A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [122]
Harrison wanted both to comfort Nora and to shake her. How could she have been so willing?
“Once I learned that Carl was sick, I couldn’t leave him, could I?” Nora asked. “Well, clearly not. Possibly I was relieved that our whole false marriage would have a finite end. And perhaps Carl sensed that in me, because as the days passed, as he realized he would not get better, even with all the chemo and the radiation, he grew furious. Unspeakably furious.” Nora paused. “It’s remarkable how fast love can turn to hate,” she added.
“Nora,” Harrison said.
“You cannot imagine how relieved I was when he died. How grateful I was that he’d taken care of it himself.”
A silence in the room stretched to minutes.
“After the funeral, I went looking for Judy,” Nora said. “I think I had an idea of taking the baby and trying to raise it. But she had given him—it was a boy—away to a Catholic charity.”
Harrison could hear, finally, the effort to ward off tears.
Nora took a long breath and looked up at the ceiling. The loss of the baby, then, had been for Nora the true tragedy.
“And that was when I conceived of the idea of an inn,” she said.
“You hired Judy,” Harrison said.
“I brought her here to live. And then I trained her.”
“The two of you run the inn.”
“Yes,” Nora said. “I pay her well.”
Harrison wished he had one more day. One more week. “I don’t want to go back to Toronto,” he said. “It’s awful to feel that way - it’s terrible to feel that way—but it’s true. I want to stay here with you.”
Nora got up from the bed and stood in front of him. “This is my fortress,” she said. “It is as I want it to be. As I need it to be.”
He stood, and she kissed him.
“I have to dress,” she said.
Harrison knew now that he and Nora would not see each other again. Not at their thirtieth reunion, in three years, nor at the fortieth, nor at the fiftieth, should Harrison still be alive for that one. One day, a man—like Harrison but unattached, a man with no shared history—would come to the inn and see Nora and talk to her, and that would be that.
“Your husband was right,” Harrison said. “There are no words to describe a certain kind of pain.”
He walked to the double doors and opened them. He stepped out onto the veranda. His children would never know of their father’s treachery. Harrison would go home and play baseball and skate with his boys, and they would never know that for a period of time—for the duration—he had been willing to leave them.
The sun was unexpectedly warm on his face. He moved through the slush toward the front of the inn. As he did, he thought about melting glaciers and all those birds flying north.
Through her window, Agnes saw Innes coming around the corner, walking through the snow in his shirtsleeves. Of course, it wasn’t Innes, but rather Harrison Branch in the same shirt and pants he’d had on last night. But it might have been Innes, as Innes would have been at forty-four. The same upright but diffident posture. The slightly thinning hair. Why was Harrison walking in the snow?
Behind Agnes, on the bed, was her neatly packed duffel bag, her coat lying in folds, her backpack topped up with the free soaps and shampoos the inn (Nora?) had generously provided. She glanced at the letter to Jim Mitchell sitting unfinished on the desk, the one she’d written yesterday before her confession at dinner. Agnes would tear it up and discard it (no need to smuggle home the pieces now). It was possible, Agnes supposed, that Jim would never know of her treachery, that he would imagine that Agnes had simply faded away. And that, she decided, was precisely what would happen. She would fade away. She would return to Kidd, a place from which, physically and in her thoughts, she had rarely left. She would later this afternoon correct a set of papers for her U.S. history class, after which